Individuals will recognize an object of interest located in an image, which may be referred to as a main focus of attention for a typical viewer (or a “salient object”). A salient object may be defined as an object being prominent or noticeable. For instance, individuals may identify a salient object in visual images, such as in a photograph, a picture collage, a video, or the like.
Recently, computational models have been created to identify a salient object in an image. These computational models may rely on various methods using computer systems to identify a salient object within an image. One of the computational models computes a saliency value for each pixel based on color and orientation information using “center-surround” operations, akin to visual receptive fields. Another computational model relies on a conditional random fields (CRF) framework to separate a salient object from a background of an image. In yet another example, another computational model defines saliency with respect to all of the regions in the image.